Ars polices the intersection of law, politics, and technology from the week …

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If there's a moral to this week's political stories, it's that it pays to spend a few minutes acquainting yourself with the privacy settings on your social networking sites. We've learned, after all, that the First Amendment won't save you if that funny photo with the pirate hat and the plastic cup-o-grog gets you booted from your teacher training program.

Then again, scrupulous maintenance of your settings won't help if, like Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, you have camera-happy friends whose photos of you groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton end up on Facebook anyway. The hue and cry provoked by that photo, however, provoked some of us to wonder if there's something unhealthy about a political culture that makes every embarrassing moment potential front-page news.

Speaking of unhealthy political cultures, Nate Anderson was a little sick to his stomach after hearing FCC commissioner Deborah Tate sing the praises of DRM and endorse ISP filtering of traffic to weed out copyrighted content. Also, she's still touting that old canard about $250 billion in losses to IP theft? Obviously, she's not reading Ars. We're hurt, Deborah. Coal for you this Christmas.

Anti–'Net neutrality crusader Scott Cleland tripped the light shilltastic with a "research study" claiming that Google is totally stealing your broadband because they don't pay all the costs of delivering their content to users. His thorough analysis won him a solid 24 hours of ridicule around the Internet, and we couldn't help but join in.

It's a little harder to spot equivalent hackery in the debate over the fiendishly complex Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but there's certainly no shortage of it out there. For those just tuning in: the notion that FISA required a warrant to intercept purely international communications was debunked ages ago; this summer's FISA amendments did not increase judicial scrutiny of surveillance, and yes, history shows that wiretapping authority without oversight (shockingly) does get abused.